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Farm Now a Theater —Another Mall Built

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SCHAUMBURG, Ill.— It has been almost 72 months now since Ed Oehlerking donned his coveralls and cap, climbed up on his big green combine and rode out in his field here‐to harvest the corn and bean's for the last time.

Mr. Oehlerking has spent a lot of time in Florida since then, because he came into a lot of money.

He sold his soil for $5,000 an acre so that some of the best crop land in western Cook County could become some of the site for the world's largest enclosed shopping center, Woodfield Mail.

This tribute to a merchandising mania, which is 1.5 times bigger than Vatican City, may be larger in scale, but in essence it is much like any of the 14,500 shopping centers that dot the land from Orlando to Oahu.

Such centers, often built in tiny towns whose biggest structure was once a feed store, have become American suburbia's answer to the cities' declining central business districts. Except that in modern suburbia, nothing is central. And nothing is permanent.

So now Mr. Oehlerking's farm is covered by a J. C. Penney store and a parking lot. Eddie Freise's former place is a furniture store and a parking lot. Bill Rohlwing's farm is a twin movie theater and a parking lot. And the Clausings's land is a parking lot.

“I never shop over there,” said Marian Oehlerking, whose husband is now a real estate investor. “It's too big for me.”

Search for Parking

But it is not too big for 197,000 other people who on some days jam the 191‐acre shopping center, driving more miles looking for a parking space than they did getting to the center.

Woodfield (named for the late Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck and Marshall Field of Marshall Field's, two mall tenants) is big. It has its own newspaper. One man spends his entire working life cleaning the railings. Another, Art Dern, cleans litter from miles of carpeting. “I hate chewing gum,” he says.

The management does not disclose rents, but tenants call them “ridiculous” and “astronomical.” “It's unarmed robbery,” said one who, like the others, had to decorate from the cement up. A number of store areas are boarded up.

It is not too hard to find Woodfield. It has one of the few 128‐foot, 750,000‐gallon, yellow and orange striped water towers in the neighborhood.

On the outside the mall resembles a Pentagon Building minus most windows. The multicolored interior (kept at a constant 72 degrees) reminds many of a freeway interchange— decorated with carpeting, sculptures and a waterfall. At peak weekend travel times the lanes of shuffling shoppers creep along the marble or carpeted walkways, some taking exit ramps to other levels to avoid traffic tie‐ups around spilled ice cream cones and overturned baby carriages.

“We try to clean up those messes as quickly as possible,” says Gerard Dempsey, whose responsibilities include maintenance. “All my men are radio operated.”

The sounds of Muzak seep from the ceiling. “It's soothing if you've just been on the expressway,” said one employe, “but after eight hours of soothing, you go home babbling.” Generally though, the acoustics are as good as those in any high school gymnasium.

Woodfield is owned jointly by A. Alfred Taubman and Richard Kughn, mall developers from Michigan, and Homart, a Sears subsidiary. It is managed by Stanley Jaffe, one of a corps of shopping center managers across the country who work their way up from small malls to the big time.

Whatever their league, these commercial collections exert powerful economic and social influences on suburban life. New Jersey's Delaware Township even changed its name to Cherry Hill to match a new mall's name.

An attractive center can sap the economic vitality of many surrounding suburbs.

Shopping centers also offer many uses in one place. Without fear of being mugged or questioned by police, a shopping center patron can sit at central mall, read a book, watch the girls, snooze or meet a mistress in anonymity safe from the fall rains, as some do at Woodfield. One Cleveland shopping center even has a cemetery next door.

But like practically everything else in suburban American life, the shopping center requires a car. And sometimes here on the edge of Interstate 90, even that is a little risky. So Schaumburg officials made the mall into its own police precinct.

Being indoors was one attraction the other morning for Mrs. Jill Plaza. Like most mall customers that morning Mrs. Plaza was a white suburban housewife wearing slacks and pushing a toddler in a foldup stroller that fits in the car trunk.

She had gotten her husband off to work, done the dishes and driven to the mall on an errand (to buy mittens for 2‐year‐old Julie). Then she decided to stroll until lunchtime.

Hers was an impulsive trip. Julie will not need the mittens for weeks yet, but it was an outing and a chance to visit briefly what serves today as suburbia's indoor Main Street.

And Mrs. Plaza's simple 10‐minute journey to the mall illustrated the attraction of such facilities where one free parking of the car leads to the conclusion of every family errand imaginable.

And so between 11 A.M. and 1 P.M. workers on lunch breaks race to the mall to shop. Then business slows, except for the elderly and those playing hooky to ice skate on the new rink.

Around 4, teen‐agers not out for football strut and sprawl in the mall, buying records, making dates and postponing homework. About 5 P.M. the fathers drop by with wives to purchase furniture or men's suits.

There's a pause during dinner, followed by more families, many out for ice cream cones. The toddlers are long home in bed. At 9:30 generally the mall closes and becomes like many cities' downtowns—dead.

At 2 A.M. though, the cleaning crews arrive.. It is then that Barnai Hirdeza can start the night's floor waxing. It takes him one month of nights to wax the entire floor from one end of Mr. Oehlerking's corn field to Mr. Freise's bean patch.

A version of this archives appears in print on October 17, 1973, on Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Farm Now a Theater —Another Mall Built. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe